The max write speed is 15,000 MB. This is a joke. It is embarassing to hear feed back from my ESIXi users. I am unable to use the settings the white paper says to use to increase the speed as they are blocked by Intel software. For example "Adaptive Read Ahead" and "Write Back".

INTEL gives me a license and ID. I cannot get the necessary LAC from LSI. They say the Intel Credentials are unknown

They say Intel is on drugs. Still I have from Intel the serial number of SP14812880 and a very long ID beginning with VCHCIWBHN34DJ1J97V12RB

VLHXVPHFQCVMP68RZ and etc. I would assume that if I could download as Intel says I can from LSI the Advanced Software it would unlock the commands used to speed up the extremely slow write speed that makes the controller unusable in the real world???

So that my Question. Given my acceptable read speed of 300,000 what should I do to get the write speed from 15,000 up to at least 100,000 ???

What are the new instructions to unlock LAC from LSI???

Other than the slow speed and the blocked settings as above the controller card RS2WC040 works well. It is very stable.

Thank you very much for your reply setting me straight on one of the two issues. I take it you mean Intel No Longer uses LSI advanced software??? Using your most recent Raid Web Counsel 2 less than 2 months old I obtained the serial number and other code and links to the LSI site so it must have been used in the recent past?? I wasted 2 hours trying to use these 2 items and Intel's link to get a LAC number. Finally LSI support set me straight. Should Intel not correct these instructions on the RWC2WC040 to save other purchasers from wasting their time? Also the Intel white paper did not say as you imply that the case is the raid card does not support the settings that give more speed? ( see my original posting ). Should the white paper be supplemented?

I am sure other purchasers would appreciate this knowledge that LSI links supplied by Intel no longer work!!

Thanks again I will abandon this tack. I was not going to buy one as the cost was around $200 but another Intel document said that I could speed up SSDs attached to the RS2WC040 by buying a device. It even showed where to attach it to the raid card. Is this also incorrect?

And we are still left with the unacceptable slow write speeds! I await your advice on that score.

If appropriate I await scores on other persons controllers or your test results from your lab. I am surprised I could not find these figures on your website. We have a D2700Mud Intel product NOT used in our business. Still it hosts server software and even the write speed of this modest rig kills the current write speed of your raid card!!

If I may introduce another topic. If I cannot speed up this raid card I need to replace it. I plan on buying your Intel

E5 server board and a pair of E5 cpus to put on it. However we are still researching the configuration.

If i pre-buy the

8 Port RAID Mod Siom LSI2208-SAS SATA Megaraid 1GB

Manufacturer Part Number:RMS25PB080 meant for the E5 setup

or similar NOW can I temporarily put it on an ASUS PW8 motherboard with a e3-1275 xeon cpu and ECCC memory??

If not what is a modern Intel motherboard with a fast write speed that would do the trick?? I looked at serveral other Intel raid cards and they all go back to 2010. Must be compatible with ESIXi 5.0.0.

No Intel RAID controllers do not use "LSI advanced software". That's an LSI capability.

Regarding the performance issue of the RS2W0X0 controller, The RS2WC0X0 RAID controller only has 2 MB "context" cache which is embedded in ROC/Controller and not separate cache memory. The issue here is there is no local memory to do writeback operations. Also , there is no local memory or CPU cycles to do the RAID 5 XOR calculations, so raid 5 write performance is lower because this controller must borrow CPU cycles from the system and memory from the system, and send these transactions up the PCIe bus for memory and CPU access. The write speed cannot be improved. The RS2WC0x0 controller also only offers write-through, Normal Read and Direct I/O cache options. These won't be as fast as write back cache. This is an entry level controller, if you need higher Raid 5 performance, look at a mainstream controller such as the RMS2MH080 (module), or one of the HWRAID adapters like the RS2BL080/040.

Can you point me to the Intel document that said you canspeed up SSDs attached to the RS2WC040 by buying a device?

I can't "recommend" motherboards for you, you can imagine the issue if something didn't work out. You'll need to investigate for your specific needs yourself.

The RMS25PB080 is a proprietary RAID module. I suggest contacting ASUS for compatibility with their motherboard. We do have a Hardware and Operating System Compatibility list for the RMS25PB080 RAID module, but ASUS isn't listed there. In fact it states, "do not support 3rd party server boards".

I am also processing your info on the several raid controllers. Thankyou. I will be back on the other points.

For others needing some faster write speeds using the Intel raid controller:

We spent some time patching the hyperviser 5.0.0 running on an xeon processor and the intel raid card. We deployed the VMWare VMs onto another machine and added some non raid SSDs to the xeon server as a patch. We then deployed the mission critical VMs back onto the server but on the SSDs. The others went back onto the slow intel raid controller. The key is that you can have several datastores holding the VMs. You do NOT need one big fat datastore of several TBs. I did not realize that. I can see to complete the mission we will need a controller card with 8 leads for say 2 to 4 ssds and 4 regular harddrives. The intel expansion card would be overkill.

I see the confusion. The article itself was meant to provide information about support for LSI* MegaRAID CacheCade* and refers to Intel® RAID controllers support of Intel "equivalent" SSD Cache with Fast-Path I/O. It should have said some do and some don't. I've updated the article to be more clear. The included Intel® RAID Product Matrix makes a point that it's the LSI* SAS2108 processor-based controllers that support SSD Cache. The RS2WC0X0 controllers are LSI* SAS2008 based and do not support SSD Cache.

dear john Well you ( and your backup crew ) are a genius!! I finally found time to set up the unattended move of many many Gigs of files and then put up Raid 0 on your RS2WC040 to replace Raid 5.

The Server now flies!! Using 4 One Gig Hard drives Write Speed is around 300,0000. Read is around 350,000. Performance about as good as one program I was forced to put on a single Patriot Wildfire SSD on same machine same boot. The Hyperviser saw the raw Intel Raid Controller space right off without installing drivers so setting up the Data Store took about 30 seconds. I used a one TB virtual drive on the controller for this trial. I will attempt 3 TB for the next run & if that fails drop to 2 TB.

The above is all positive.

Just so you know ( I am not complaining ) it was NOT simple converting over to Raid 0. Several things happened. While the Intel software is straight forward and simple so the conversion should have taken maybe 3 to 4 minutes it took over an hour.

Why? Well the program refused to follow instructions. It also kept advising my settings were inappropriate. But RS2WC040 as you have confirmed cannot do the reocommended settings.

And while I did everything right several times it ignored my instructions and set up Raid 5 which I did not know until after it completed. Other times when I attempted to put Raid 0 for Raid 5 it switched me to the section that advises "MegaRaid5" and gives me my LSI license number and so forth. I kept trying and the final stumbling block was a "Hole" it demanded. But it would not accept my highlighting to give the "Hole". Here I kept trying which normally is a waste of time and it finally accepted my click for the demanded "hole" and highlighted the "hole" choice ( but it only offered me one "hole" ??? ) so I could go to the next screen. To repeat I am not complaining. The entire Controller is now set to Raid 0. it's not like you need to do the above for each virtual drive you set up on the controller.

I owe you more feed back about more misleading statements but will have to do another day.

Intel RS2WC040 is a fine raid controller card if you use Raid 0. It achieves speed of over 300,000 both read and write on a 4 hard drive raid.

It is very stable. Hyperviser 5.0 & 5.0.0 work fine with it right out of the box.

If you need a faster write speed ( more than 15,000 which is very slow ), Sata 3.0 or Raid 5 or Virtual Drives over 2 TBs Do Not Buy This Card. Buy perhaps RMS25PB080 which additionally has a cache and is much faster.

There are some tricks involved to achieve the above 300,000 write speeds at Raid 0 which took me ( with the help of John at Intel a long time to solve. ). Here are the tricks so you will not waste time as I did.

If Control G does not put you into the Raid Controller Set Up then: If not taken to motherboard setup go there. Look for clicking a new choice to boot like xxxRomxxx. This will put you into the Controller set up.

So once into controller set up by the above method or if you are lucky by using Control G then:

Put a 0 raid virtual drive up to 2TB onto the controller. You must assume that you might not get back into controller set up. Be sure to complete one Virtual Drive! Typically the controller set up software will try to trick you into believing you have completed raid 0 but in fact it has done its own thing and you have a raid 5 virtual drive. triple check you have a raid 0 virtual drive before exiting controller set up. You can then make additional virtual drives using the modern intel program Console 2 from windows. This one is quick and fast and does not try to trick you.

If you are building a hyperviser or something in linux have a spare disk with windows and swap disks or use esata and boot from that to complete your additional raid virtual drives using Console 2. That's it.

Bear in mind none of the commands that would speed up raid 5 work. they are dummy commands. this is an entry level controller. this means per Intel's use of the phrase that it only effectively works with the basic commands. there is no cache. Advanced commands are all dummy ones.

so when you are told by the software to modify the basic commands as the controller would be too slow with the default ones it will NOT modify. You are doing nothing wrong. You are also given ids and serial numbers and links to LSI ( the RS2WC040 has an LSI device on it ) the implication being you can buy a key to use the speed up commands. This is not so. Do not waste time trying this. This apparently is a practical joke!! Finally despite the offer to purchase for $200 a speed up module to use with ssds attached to the controller it is not available for RS2WC040. Intel has advised they are correcting this offer to purchase.

I would like to thank John at Intel and his support staff for their time & help.

The problem is solved. And yes I am in the process of ordering RMS25PB080! Still my RS2WC040 is hard at work as i write this!